Rafa Running Out Of Time ?

First things first, congratulations to Rafa Benitez and Liverpool for securing an improbable but convincing victory over the aristocrats of Italian football, Internazionale who has swept all before them in the Serie A. Tactical genius or very, very lucky? Credit has to be given when its due to Benitez whose side came out of the blocks early to harass and put pressure on the Serie A side who unashamedly were playing for draw.

Liverpool on Tuesday looked nothing like the side who were knocked out by Barnsley, displaying attacking intent and vigor and finding spaces for the midfield and the front two to attack. Replacing Babel with J. Pennant when Benayoun probably looked like the better option when it was still deadlocked at 0-0 with Inter a man short, I thought surely this tactical blunder was going to bite Rafa in the ass but little did I know (with my couch and Championship Manager knowledge) that Rafa knows best when Pennant set up both goals.

Benitez is a good man with some impeccable, even brilliant qualities, but there are also flaws which make it increasingly improbable that even that convincing victory, will do much more than prolong what is becoming an agony. Kudos to fans for making a stand against the Americans Gillett and Hicks and the 5000 club (where by every member would commit GBP $10,000) but I feel its only a matter of time before Rafa would be another high-profile casualty in the cruel world managing top-flight Premier League teams.

Certainly, Benitez should know better than most the folly of believing his Champions League triumph in Istanbul still bestows the job security of a senior civil servant. Yet still he clings to a remarkable but ageing victory, all the time failing to grasp that football, no more than any other competitive business, has the notion 'you are only as good as your last match in charge'.

No, the game will always be concerned with today and tomorrow, a truth the Liverpool manager ignored when he declared, on the day he lost to Barnsley: "I don't know too many managers who have won the European Cup." As a fellow Spaniard, he among all people should remember Vincente Del Bosque who even after winning the UEFA Champions League not once but TWICE was still sacked the following season.

The harsh truth is that Benitez, with ever diminishing success, appears to have been attempting to impose his own increasingly bizarre version of reality. The more emphatic he becomes in his self-belief, the further his team seems to slip away. But then let's be honest. Rafa is not building a team. What he has been quietly organizing is an assortment, a series of options. An endless jigsaw puzzle if you will.
Benitez believes in the ever shifting jigsaw game. He has made rotation a personal creed, supported by nothing more substantial than a belief in his own powers to play the master puppeteer. The result was shocking against Barnsley. It ran far deeper than the unrest of the fans. The body language of the team announced dismay even before Jamie Carragher, a bulwark of central defence who was recently asked to play at right-back, went public with his belief that the team is just not good enough to win the title.

Hearing the comments of the zealous Carragher brought a specially biting sadness for anyone who was around on that Istanbul dawn when Benitez so impressively outlined his plans for Liverpool's future.

This constant rotation and 'tinkering' has done nothing of which has encouraged the fundamental ambition of every great manager – a sense of growth.

Benitez's predecessor Bill Shankly never won a European Cup but he did lay down the principles of an empire which, at one point, gathered it in as though it was not a challenge but a right.

Shankly signed players like St John and Yeats and Hughes and nurtured players like Tommy Smith and made them gods. Benitez doesn't make gods – he makes squad members and bench warmers to be deployed when the fancy takes him.

He has been trying to win while ignoring the most basic aspect of building a winning team. However many winners of Europe's top prize Benitez does know, he has clearly failed to see an instinct that links them all, from Sir Matt Busby and Jock Stein to Sir Alex Ferguson, Arsene Wenger and Jose Mourinho..

The problem is increasingly plain. There has been no development. Some tactical triumphs, no doubt. But no evolution. Benitez juggles his players without the merest acknowledgement of another school of thought, which points out that every great team has thrived on familiarity and mutual respect in the dressing room.

When Sir Bobby Charlton and Nobby Stiles became the only Englishmen to win both the World Cup and European Cup (in the space of two years), they did it while playing more than 60 games a season, most often on pitches which the modern player would dismiss as so many ploughed fields. Shankly made a change in his team as a last resort rather than a first instinct. He won a title with only 13 players.

Yes, we know times change, along with diets and scientific input and equipment, but some things are eternal.

One of them is the need of a professional footballer to feel secure in his role – and his ability. That can only be reinforced by seeing his name on the team sheet. Fighters fight and footballers play football, even if they are rich beyond most dreams.

Liverpool now have to count the consequences. Most discouragingly, they include the breaking voice of Jamie Carragher and his manager's desperate belief that a great club once familiar with serial success can be sustained by not much more than an old deposit made in the bank of Istanbul.